Monday, April 23, 2007

My Three Shrinks Podcast 17: Happy Anniversary!

This podcast comes out the day after the 1-year anniversary of our blog. Thank you to all of our well-wishers. It's not always easy to keep something like this, and the podcast, going. But having friends like Dinah and Clink make it easy.

Note that next week will be a special podcast, where we will discuss many of the submissions for our May 1 Grand Rounds. Send us your submissions by Saturday, April 28, 2007, at midnight at mythreeshrinksATgmailDOTcom. We'll even include some brief audio comments about your post (attach a 20-30 sec .m3).April 22, 2007
Topics include:

A lot of silly talk about our anniversary, gifts, ducks, and chocolate.

6 comments:

We can all learn about the known risk factors for autism and schizophrenia. Increasing paternal age is a major risk factor for these disorders which start increasing by 33-35.

"It makes sense that the mutations causing these diseases would occur more frequently in older men, and indeed that's what we saw for Apert syndrome," says Ethylin Jabs, M.D., director of the Center for Craniofacial Development and Disorders at Johns Hopkins. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2002/10/021018080014.htm"Importantly, disorders linked to advancing paternal age begin to increase rapidly at about the same time as maternal risks increase -- age 33 to 35. Until now, the only evidence for paternal age effects has come from determining how many children with these diseases are born to fathers of various ages"http://www.schizophreniaforum.org/for/curr/Malaspina/default.asp

http://www.primarypsychiatry.com/aspx/articledetail.aspx?articleid=494Dr. Dolores Malaspina"The most irrefutable finding is our demonstration that a father’s age is a major risk factor for schizophrenia. We were the first group to show that schizophrenia is linearly related to paternal age and that the risk is tripled for the offspring of the oldest groups of fathers.7 This finding has been born out in every single cohort study that has looked at paternal age and the risk for schizophrenia. The only other finding that has been as consistently replicated in schizophrenia research is that there is an increased risk associated with a family history of schizophrenia. Since only 10% to 15% of schizophrenia cases have a family history, family history does not explain much of the population risk for schizophrenia. However, we think that approximately one third or one quarter of all schizophrenia cases may be attributable to paternal age. Paternal age is the major source of de novo genetic diseases in the human population, which was first described by Penrose8 in the 1950s. He hypothesized that this was due to copy errors that arose in the male germ line over the many cycles of sperm cell replications. These mutations accumulate as paternal age advances. After the Penrose report, medical researchers identified scores of sporadic diseases in the offspring of older fathers, suggesting that these could occur from gene mutations. Particular attention was paid to conditions in last-born children. In the 1960s, an excess of schizophrenia in last-born children was also reported"

It is 2007 and the connection between advancing paternal age and schizophrenia was first written about in 1958. Classically autistic children were found to have fathers who were much older that the general population in 1980 by Christopher Gillberg. That mean average paternal age of the fathers of autistic children was 34.http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?db=pubmed&cmd=Retrieve&dopt=AbstractPlus&list_uids=17142012&query_hl=14&itool=pubmed_docsumPaternal ages below or above 35 years old are associated with a different risk of schizophrenia in the offspring.Dr. Philip Gorwood

Roy - Thanks for mentioning that museum at Walter Reed. I'm going to make my friend take me there now (she starts her residency there in a few weeks). haha! And if your son liked that, you may want to also come down here to take him to "Bodies: The Exhibition" at the Dome (formerly the Newseum) in Rosslyn. I'll be seeing it soon. Bodies are cool! :-)

How about "Body Worlds" at The Museum of Nature and Science in Dallas.

It is;

"Created by anatomist and licensed physician Dr. Gunther von Hagens, the BODY WORLDS exhibition is the world's first public anatomical presentation using Plastination, his groundbreaking method of specimen preservation. The display of approximately 200 authentic organs, organ configurations, and a broad collection of whole-body plastinates offers an unprecedented view of the human body. Visitors will be able to observe the body's functions, including locomotive, digestive, nervous and vascular systems, and compare healthy and diseased organs such as a healthy lung with that of a smoker's lung."

From the website; http://www.natureandscience.org/information/press/bodyworlds.asp